Painful Pampering

For the last couple of weeks, my body has been telling me that it needs some TLC; the grey hairs have been threatening to rear their ugly heads, the rough skin on my feet has kept catching on the bedcovers and plucking them, the hairs on my legs (and probably from other parts of my body) have been scratching my husband in bed and the broken veins and uneven pigment on my face have been getting too much for my foundation to handle, so last night I decided I would have a bath and ‘pamper’ myself.

It wasn’t a pretty sight.

Firstly, I had to colour my hair in two stages to cover the regrowth, so for the first fifteen minutes I looked like Bill Bailey on a bad day with the top half plastered to my head and a wild, frizzy, out of condition halo at the bottom.

I put on a face pack that kept sliding into my mouth and eyes because I was sweating profusely (even though I had one leg hanging out of the side of the bath to try and cool myself down) and my eyebrows, which I had plucked to within an inch of their lives before getting into the bath, started stinging from the face pack and glowed red above my bloodshot eyes.

I shaved my legs, treating myself to a new razor for the first time in about six months, so the blood from numerous nicks and grazes dripped steadily into the bath as I paid particular attention to blitzing the extra long stragglers around my ankles that I always miss.

I vigorously sloughed the dead skin off my feet (the effort of which made me sweat even more), filed my nails (imagine Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber getting ready for the charity ball) and applied clear nail hardener to them as a treat after neglecting them for so long.

I put night serum and night cream on my face which, combined with the sweat, looked like I had poured chip pan oil over my face and made my glasses slip down my nose at two second intervals.

I moisturised all over and put on my dressing gown which immediately stuck to the cream and the sweat, so I thought better of it and came downstairs in just my underwear, sneaking through the house in case anyone could see in, so that I could dry my hair without waking everyone up.

I walked into the conservatory…and stood directly on a slug that had managed to get in through a gap in the wall.  Now if I hadn’t rubbed the super thick layer of dead skin off my feet I may well not even have known it was there, but on my soft, smooth, recently moisturised feet I clearly felt the squish.

I cleaned up, stopped retching and dried my hair, which, true to form because of the humidity, fluffed out into a highly attractive, super charged afro.

I stood in my conservatory, taking stock of my patchy, frizzy hair and ‘chocolate brown’ stained ears, neck and forehead, greasy face, sweaty body, prickly, bleeding legs and ankles, raw armpits and remnants of slug between my toes and thought, ‘MAKING AN EFFORT SHOULD NOT BE THIS MUCH HARD WORK!!’ 🙂